I can't muster up much enthusiasm to talk about this
excellent film, first because so much has already been written about it and the other
entries in the Hannibal Lecter series (the MRQE has 209 articles on
this film alone), and second because I've
already discussed the most interesting plot elements in an earlier
review. You see, this is actually the second
time that the novel Red Dragon has been brought to the screen. The
first time was in 1986 in a Michael Mann film called Manhunter.
Since the two films have virtually the same plot, you can get a
basic summary from my comments on Manhunter.

NUDITY REPORT

Mary-Louise Parker is seen braless.

Marguerite MacIntyre is topless as one of the
victims.

Ralph Fiennes is naked, seen
clearly from the rear as well as a brief frontal.

Red Dragon could be considered a remake of
Manhunter, I suppose, or it could be more accurately called a second
film from the same novel. In some cases, the dialogue is equal to Manhunter
verbatim. In other cases, notably the beginning end
ending, complete scenes have been added which are in neither the
theatrical version of Manhunter nor the expanded director's cut. I
liked the new beginning and ending in Red Dragon. I have always felt that Manhunter
ended rather abruptly, and so I welcomed the fact that Red Dragon
extends the denouement a bit with a very clever and tense post
script. It is a bit "Hollywood", but it is slick.

The new beginning is just plain excellent. It starts with a few minutes
in the life of Dr. Lecter before his capture, and that scene is
mediocre, a rather high camp presentation in the elegant grand
guignol style of Hannibal, the previous Lecter film. The next scene,
however, is a beautiful presentation of the showdown between Agent
Graham and Dr. Lecter, which nearly led to death for both of them.
The edge is razor-sharp in this scene with excellent pacing from the
director, some macabre imagination, and acting from two absolute
masters of character, Sir Tony Hopkins and Edward Norton. Very
impressive is the fact that Hopkins and Norton manage to show the
audience that the evil genius Dr Lecter knows Graham is about to
finger Lecter in the case on which they had been collaborating, even
though Graham himself has no such awareness.

That scene set the table beautifully, and provided
us with some background in a very interesting way, which allowed us
no understand viscerally why Graham feared Lecter, not just because
we heard him or Lecter say so, but because we saw Lecter's destructive power
with our own eyes, and felt what Graham felt.

Manhunter is a terrific movie, but it is more
about style and atmosphere than narrative. To be more precise, it is
more about Michael Mann than it is about Hannibal Lecter and the Red
Dragon. Every scene drips with the kind of stylistic touches that
mark Mann's work: the single musical chord dying out in the background, the layered staircases, the rock score, the ominous and
hollow line delivery, the unexpected feeling of solitude in a
crowded urban area. It might easily be a big screen version of Miami
Vice. Dr Lecter's cell, for example, is all white and brightly-lit,
and his clothing is white, allowing the few colored elements on
screen to pop to our attention. It's as if he were imprisoned
in the Art Deco district. There are very few items to be seen
anywhere. Rooms, even streets, tend to be empty except for a few key items which
are necessary for the plot and visual impact. The staging is minimalist. The acting
from Agent Graham is intense and unsmiling. He is a man carrying the
world on his shoulders.

Red Dragon's director, Brett Ratner, went
about things in a completely different way. He allowed visual
imagination from his design people, but he tried for a more
realistic approach except for Lecter's prison cell, the medieval design
of which was dictated by Silence of the Lambs. Rooms are decorated
to look the way they might really have looked, not to create a
certain style. The background music stayed out of the way as much as
possible. Agent Graham acted less like a man carrying the world than
just a nice guy who couldn't turn down a distasteful assignment.
Edward Norton's greatest skill as an actor is to make you believe
that he could be one of us, a real person, in a larger than life
situation. Manhunter's William Peterson approached Agent Graham with more of the earnest
purposefulness of an expressionistic character icon. Peterson was
a cop with a grave responsibility. Norton was our next door neighbor
who just happened to be a cop with a grave responsibility.

Ratner came up with a truly exceptional cast. In
addition to Hopkins and Norton, he landed Ralph Fiennes as the other
lead (who is better at playing a disturbed humorless personality?).
The small roles are filled out by such stalwarts as Harvey Keitel,
Emily Watson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, all of whom deliver as
close to perfection as is possible in this imperfect world.

Red Dragon is a terrific, underrated film. Silence of
the Lambs won a bunch of award-season hardware, and is currently
rated #22 of all time at IMDb. Red Dragon won no major awards, but is
nearly as
good, and is better in some ways. Manhunter is also acclaimed by many, yet Red
Dragon is riveting even if you know the Manhunter story by heart. I
saw Red Dragon in the theatrical release, and I have watched
Manhunter three times, including last night. Yet I still watched Red
Dragon frame by frame last night, enjoying it as much as I did the first time,
admiring the skillful management of tension and the
characterizations. It is the work of genre masters at the top of
their game.

Box Office Mojo. It was budgeted at $78 million for
production, and the distribution/advertising costs are
estimated around $30 million. It did 36 million in its
opening weekend, stayed at #1 for an additional week, and
finished at $93 million. That was OK, but if this one had been released
first instead of Hannibal (which did $165 million), I believe it
would have topped $200 million. The Silence of the Lambs did
$130 million, and poor neglected Manhunter only $8 million.

Exit interviews:
Cinema Score. Excellent. A-. Nothing lower than a B+.
Silence of the Lambs was also an A-, but a slightly stronger
A-. They performed identically with younger and older
audience, but Silence was stronger with the 21-34 group, A
to B+. Manhunter, a B overall, performed as well as the
other two with women, but was rated lower by men. Hannibal
was only a C+, having managed to amass a superlative box
office based on pent-up expectation.

The meaning of the IMDb
score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics.
Films rated below five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one
and a half stars from the critics or even less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. (C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but
will be considered excellent by genre fans, while
C- indicates that it we found it to
be a poor movie although genre addicts find it watchable). D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well.

Any film rated C- or better is recommended for
fans of that type of film. Any film rated B- or better is
recommended for just about anyone. We don't score films below C-
that often, because we like movies and we think that most of
them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know
that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below
C-.

Based on this description, this
film is a B. It's just about as good a
scary crime thriller as has ever been brought to the screen.
Obviously, it can't duplicate the freshness of The Silence of the Lambs,
but I believe that if
this one had come first, we might now think of Silence as an
inferior sequel. Tremendous DVD as well.